how would anarcho-capitalism work?

Posted on: July 14, 2021 at 12:11:32 CT

In one sense, this is easy to answer. Since most people are familiar with capitalism, one could simply say, "Just like today's semi-capitalist societies, except with no coercive monopolies." As already noted, most services currently provided by State have been done voluntarily in the past, usually with better quality and service than the State. This is what you'd expect, since monopolies lack the usual competitive incentives to improve. The services that people have not already seen provided privately, such as court, police, and defense against military invasion, require more explanation.


“ "Imagine a society with no government. Individuals purchase law enforcement from private firms. Each such firm faces possible conflicts with other firms. Private policemen working for the enforcement agency that I employ may track down the burglar who stole my property only to discover, when they try to arrest him, that he too employs an enforcement agency.

There are three ways in which such conflicts might be dealt with. The most obvious and least likely is direct violence-a mini-war between my agency, attempting to arrest the burglar, and his agency attempting to defend him from arrest. A somewhat more plausible scenario is negotiation. Since warfare is expensive, agencies might include in the contracts they offer their customers a provision under which they are not obliged to defend customers against legitimate punishment for their actual crimes. When a conflict occurred, it would then be up to the two agencies to determine whether the accused customer of one would or would not be deemed guilty and turned over to the other.


A still more attractive and more likely solution is advance contracting between the agencies. Under this scenario, any two agencies that faced a significant probability of such clashes would agree on an arbitration agency to settle them - a private court. Implicit or explicit in their agreement would be the legal rules under which such disputes were to be settled.

Under these circumstances, both law enforcement and law are private goods produced on a private market. Law enforcement is produced by enforcement agencies and sold directly to their customers. Law is produced by arbitration agencies and sold to the enforcement agencies, who resell it to their customers as one characteristic of the bundle of services they provide."

– David Friedman, Law as a Private Good


There are several obvious advantages to private law.

• You are likely to be treated better by a PDA than a monopoly government agency, since you are a customer (or at least a potential customer) rather than a suspect.

• Victimless "crime" laws are significantly less likely, since customers would bear the cost of enforcing laws against vices rather than passing the cost on to society at large. (E.g. Someone opposed to marijuana is likely to vote against legalization, but less likely to pay $100/year to make it illegal.)

• But most importantly, everyone gets their own preferred law, rather than having to submit to winner-take-all imposed law. E.g. A religious puritan may subscribe to a PDA under a plan in which adulterers (who subscribe to this plan) would be stoned to death. His next-door neighbor may subscribe to a service that allows open copulation in the front yard. Both can have their way, since jurisdictions are simply the combined properties of the subscribers.

Non-government military provision is more familiar to most people, under the guise of ''militia''. A militia is a voluntary defense service which is unlikely to invade a foreign country, build weapons of mass destruction and death, fund itself with stolen money, or most other questionable actions in which government militaries routinely engage. A militia is geared to do one thing: defend the local people. Anarcho-capitalists also see a role for defense firms and mercenaries, to take care of security issues not so localized. Note that, since the costs of warfare are borne by those firms who engage in it, they are considerably more likely to sue for peace than a State, which is able to shove costs onto their plundered and conscripted citizenry.

http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/faq.html#part15

Edited by pickle at 12:12:02 on 07/14/21